Shipping giant Amazon could lay off around 10,000 employees. At least that’s what the New York Times reports. In the corona pandemic, things are going very well for the group at first, and it is investing heavily in expansion. Costs have been rising since the beginning of the year, and sales are hardly growing due to global inflation.
According to information from the “New York Times” (NYT), Amazon is planning to lay off around 10,000 employees. Insiders report that these will primarily take place in the corporate and technology sectors and will probably start this week. It would be the largest job cut in the company’s history. Amazon spokesman Brad Glasser declined to comment.
The cuts will focus on Amazon’s device organization, including voice assistant Alexa, as well as its retail division and human resources division, the sources said. The total number of layoffs is still open. But if it stays at 10,000, that would equate to about 3 percent of Amazon’s workforce and less than 1 percent of its global workforce of more than 1.5 million employees, which is made up mostly of hourly workers.
The job cuts come at an unusual time. Especially before Christmas, the group turns over particularly large sums. According to the NYT, the decision is also unusual, as the shipping giant was recently struggling to retain numerous employees. The upper limit for severance payments is said to have been doubled at the beginning of the year. At the time, there was talk of a “particularly competitive job market”.
After Twitter and Facebook parent Meta, Amazon is already the third tech giant to lay off large numbers of employees within a short period of time. New owner Elon Musk had initially laid off around 7,500 employees, Meta 11,000 – which corresponds to around 13 percent of the workforce – and now Amazon.
In the corona pandemic, Amazon was initially one of the biggest beneficiaries, writes the “New York Times”. Online shopping and cloud computing were booming, the number of employees is said to have doubled, and the high profits were invested in further expansion. But in early 2022, growth stagnated and costs rose significantly. Above all, high inflation curbed consumers’ desire to buy. All in all, these developments apparently led to the decision to lay off around 10,000 employees.
